Lawsuit against school district goes to trial in Newark schoolyard slayings

NEWARK — Pointing to a photograph of a .357 Colt Python revolver and a machete on the TV screen behind him, attorney Ric Gass told jurors the weapons and the men who wielded them — not an open schoolyard gate — killed three college-aged friends five years ago.

"These victims were killed not by bricks and mortar, not by asphalt, not by cameras, not by a fence, or a gate, or a lock," Gass said. "The schoolyard was not the murderer here."

Whether the condition of the property behind Mount Vernon School led to the Aug. 4, 2007, murderers is the topic of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the state-run Newark Public Schools District, which started its trial yesterday in Superior Court in Newark.

The district has said the students were not exercising "due care" when they went to the schoolyard — which was technically closed — a little before midnight to hang out and listen to music. Plaintiffs have called the area a "deathtrap," which was dark and covered with gang graffiti. They say it was the school district's responsibility to protect its users.

"They never get attacked if that gate was closed, if the gang graffiti was paid attention to," Marone said in court. "If this wasn't a deathtrap they could go in, the attack never occurs."

The six men responsible for the murders have been convicted or pleaded guilty and are serving a combined 1,062 years in prison.

The victims' families have sat through five years of criminal proceedings and delivered fervent victim impact statements at sentencings of each of the convicted killers. Now they are expected to testify in coming weeks.

While the criminal proceedings are over, the civil case will likely be as gruesome and painful since attorneys must discuss the pain and suffering of the victims and their families using the facts of what occurred that night.

The four friends were robbed, tortured and three of them shot execution-style. The women were sexually assaulted and attacked with a kitchen knife and a machete. One woman survived but has had multiple surgeries.

In his opening statement, Michael Marone showed jurors autopsy photos prompting looks of horror and a few tears from the jury box. Family members of the victims in the photos quietly left the courtroom or looked away.

"Nobody wants to be accountable. Nobody wants to have blood on their hands,” Marone said. “Everyone has a story of how careful they were but the fact remains the deathtrap was there in its dangerous condition because of negligence.”

Heinous as the crime was, Gass asked jurors to use logic over pathos when weighing the evidence and coming to a conclusion.

"It's easy to blame and we blame every day," Gass said. "But the law requires causations not correlations ... The law requires a logically linked chain of events." He said the random gang killing could have happened anywhere and told jurors his experts will testify the graffiti at the scene was not specific to the MS-13 gang nor was the schoolyard considered MS-13 turf.

To find the district liable jurors must determine that the property was dangerous, that its condition caused injuries and that the injuries were foreseeable, among other factors, according to the state statute.

The trial, which is expected to last five to seven weeks will continue this week with testimony from neighbors who live near the school and detectives who responded to the scene that night.